Thor Heyerdahl Biography

Norwegian anthropologist (scientist of human beings—their culture,
numbers, characteristics, and relationships) Thor Heyerdahl popularized
ideas about common links among ancient cultures worldwide. He was well
known for his ocean journeys on primitive rafts and boats that were
recorded in books, films, and television programs.

Early love of nature

Thor Heyerdahl was born into an upper-class family in the coastal
village of Larvik, Norway, in 1914. His father, Thor, was president of a
brewery and a mineral water plant, and his mother, Alison Lyng
Heyerdahl, was chairman of the Larvik Museum. His mother studied zoology
(the branch of biology that studies animals), folk art, and primitive
cultures. She influenced her son greatly. His father was an enthusiastic
outdoorsman. By age seven young Thor had started his own animal museum,
filled with specimens of seashells, butterflies, bats, lemmings, and
hedgehogs. The collection was housed in an old outhouse at his
father's brewery.

Heyerdahl and his parents spent summer holidays at a log cabin in the
wilderness, where Thor made friends with a hermit (person choosing to
live alone and away from society) and learned much about nature. By sled
and ski he also went on many winter camping trips to remote locations
with his schoolmates. Throughout his early life Heyerdahl was determined
to live in a more primitive setting.

In 1933 Heyerdahl entered the University of Oslo, in Oslo, Norway, and
specialized in zoology and geography. In Oslo he spent a lot of time at
the home of a family friend, who had a huge library of Polynesian
artifacts. With his girlfriend, Heyerdahl decided to

Thor Heyerdahl.
Reproduced by permission of the

Corbis Corporation

.

quit college and make an expedition (a trip made for a specific reason)
to the South Seas. His father agreed to finance the trip. Heyerdahl was
married on Christmas Eve in 1936, and the next day the couple set out
for the Marquesas Islands. Here Heyerdahl discovered evidence that
Peruvian (from Peru) aboriginal (the original citizens of an area)
voyagers had visited the islands. The inhabitants told him stories of
Kon-tiki, a bearded, white sun king who arrived over the sea.

Daring raft voyage

In 1938 the Heyerdahls returned to Norway and settled in a mountain
wilderness near Lillehammer. Then Heyerdahl did research among American
Indian tribes in British Columbia (Canada) in 1939 and 1940, trying to
support his theory that two waves of migration (moving from one area to
another) from the Americas—one from the northern hemisphere (half
of the earth divided by the equator) and one from the south—had
settled Polynesia.

Heyerdahl found little acceptance of his ideas in academic circles. He
planned a dramatic experiment to convince his critics that a voyage by
ancient peoples from Peru to Polynesia was possible. In 1947 he and a
crew traveled to Peru on a balsa raft, which they named the Kon-Tiki.
Heyerdahl detailed the journey in
The Kon-Tiki Expedition.
The book was translated into dozens of languages and sold more than
twenty million copies. Heyerdahl's documentary (having to do with
recording real events as they happen) movie of the voyage won him an
Academy Award in 1951. But while the Kon-Tiki voyage captured public
attention, it was not met with any scientific respect.

Heyerdahl was among a group of scientists who believed that ancient
cultures had come from a common source through land and sea migrations.
The opposing scientists thought that civilizations had cropped up around
the world independently of one another. The second theory has remained
the popular one. Still, as writer Thomas Morrow noted in
U.S. News & World Report,
Heyerdahl "has turned up a surprising amount of convincing
evidence suggesting sea contacts among remote [distant] ancient
cultures, for which he gets little credit."

Explorations worldwide

In 1953 Heyerdahl went to the Galapagos Islands, off the South American
coast.
There he and his companions found evidence that original people of
South America had visited the islands long before the Incan Empire. In
1955 Heyerdahl led an expedition to Easter Island, the remote Polynesian
island where enormous stone statues of unknown origin had been
discovered in 1722. His team found a carving of a reed ship at the base
of one of the statues and much other evidence that at least three
migrations from South America had populated the island, the earliest in
the fourth century.

In 1969 Heyerdahl organized a new expedition. In Egypt he and his crew
built a papyrus (a tall grass that grows near the Nile River) reed boat
that they named
Ra,
after the Egyptian sun god. They sailed across the Atlantic, a voyage
of 2,700 miles, but the boat broke apart 600 miles short of Barbados.
The next year Heyerdahl sailed the
Ra II
all the way from Morocco to Barbados in fifty-seven days. His account
of these expeditions is found in his book
The Ra Expeditions.
To Heyerdahl the voyages were evidence that Egyptians or other sailors
could have crossed to the Americas several thousand years before
Christopher Columbus (1451–1506).

Later challenges

In 1977, at the age of sixty-two, Heyerdahl took up another challenge.
He went to Iraq with a crew of eleven men and built a reed ship, the
Tigris.
They sailed it down the Tigris River, through the Persian Gulf, and
across the Indian Ocean to the mouth of the Indus River in Pakistan,
then westward to Djibouti at the mouth of the Red Sea on the eastern
African coast. This 4,200-mile, five-month-long voyage was an attempt to
show that the ancient civilizations of Egypt, the Indus Valley, and
Mesopotamia could have sprung from a single source. Political
instability in the region brought an early end to this expedition.

In 1982 Heyerdahl and several archaeologists undertook an expedition to
the remote Maldive islands off the coast of India. There Heyerdahl was
fascinated by stone statues that bore a striking resemblance to the
monoliths (huge stone structures) of Easter Island. His discoveries led
him to conclude that the Maldives also had been involved in prehistoric
ocean trading and migration. Heyerdahl's 1986 book,
The Maldive Mystery,
was hailed by some as a great detective story. It, too, was made into a
film, as had his expeditions to the Galapagos and Easter Island.

Heyerdahl's voyages led him to become active internationally in
fighting pollution of the oceans. In
Green was the Earth on the Seventh Day,
Heyerdahl wrote about how his voyage on the Kon-Tiki had increased his
awareness of threats to the environment.

Thor Heyerdahl died in Colla Michari, Italy, on April 18, 2002. He is
remembered as one of the best-known explorer-adventurers of modern
times.

Well...Mr Heyerdhal is the legendary expeditionist of modern time(to me)next to Columbus,Vasco, Marco Polo or even Megasthenis and Fa Hien.His socio-political,economical as well as anthropological discoveries have a huge importance for understanding the ancient spread-out of global socio-economy.My hat,remains off for all his other crews then on KON-TIKI...Anyway,this Norwegian anthropologist could be the icon ,for those...who 're now in this field of study.

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